DiRT Rally Review

DiRT Rally is the most authentic, challenging and thrilling rally game ever made, road-tested over 80 million miles by the DiRT community. It captures the essence of what makes rally unique like no other game: that white knuckle feeling of racing on the edge; trying to remain in control of your emotions as you hurtle along dangerous, undulating roads at breakneck speed, aiming to squeeze everything out of your car whilst knowing that one crash could irreparably harm your stage time.

It’s the ultimate test of a driver’s skill, and the ultimate in high risk, high reward gameplay.

Well that is what Codemasters say..

Ok to start I need to make it clear that I love driving sims and have played them for many years, being an Xbox player at heart the Forza series is special to me.  I always play my driving sims with all the assists off and with manual gears and if the options there with the clutch on manual.  Although my times my not be some of the best in the world that is how I enjoy playing the game and get a real sense of satisfaction when I “hit” the apex and shave another 10th of a second off my best lap time.  I have been eagerly awaiting a good rally game for many years and hope CODEMASTERS DiRT could be that game.

The physics of the cars movement at times are sublime and the sense of speed you feel when travelling trough forest stages is unrivalled.  The car selection is broad and starts from the early days of stage rallying right up to today’s WRC Cars, a nice addition is rally X which is an under appreciated aspect of the rally genre.  All of the surfaces feel totally different under tire and have a marked effect on the handling on the car.  For-example care has to be taken when transitioning from   tarmac to gravel as failure to hit the gravel straight will almost certainly result in a spin.  The snow stages as in real life are very challenging the snow banks drag you in and inflict catastrophic amounts of damage to you car.

Most rally events are made up of 4 stages and you have a 30 minutes stop after the 2nd stage to do repairs to your car so any damage picked up on stage 1 or 2 cannot be repaired until the service area  .  If you have inflicted a lot of damaged and your car is in a real mess then you will only be able to patch it up for stages 3 and 4 so you could well be driving a heavily damaged car or limping through the last 2 stages of the event.

Dirt rally really is unforgiving, a misheard pace note or a distraction that breaks your concentration for just a fraction of a second usually spells disaster, resulting in catastrophic damage or so much time lost you have little or no chance of winning the event.  During the 3 days of play testing the best result I managed was 3rd overall.  

I like the fact that CODEMASTERS decided to remove the rewind function ( in previous incarnations of DiRT the player could in the event of destroying the car / crashing could turn back time and resume driving from a point before the accident and avoid the obstacle)

The cars set-up is customisable gear length, ride height, damping rate, suspension travel, pretty much everything you would expect from a current gen racing sim.  A nice touch is the clutch button and the manual launch control.  The clutch isn’t used to shift gear as in a normal car but is used to assist in making the wheels loose traction, e.g. you enter a bend and your revs are low you keep the throttle open dab the clutch causing the revs to spike this “ kicks” the wheels and they loose traction causing oversteer therefore increasing your speed and revs.  The manual launch control is an interesting addition and comes into is own in the rally X events, just be-careful not to jump the gun !

DiRT really is a feast for the eyes, the environments are colourful, busy and feel very “real”.  There is a real sense of speed and proximity especially in the forest stages you find your heart racing and I was at one point sweating by the of one stage as it is truly scary flying through trees at over 100 mph only feet from what is certain death.  

The cars all look good and the damage modelling is impressive at on point my poor mini had 2 wings flapping around and a popped radiator with steam billowing out all modelled accurately ( not that I have driven a car in that state in real life)

Only on 2 occasions have I seen any frame rate drop and on both occasions it was during snow stages and I was rolling a car through a snow bank, slightly disappointing but there was a lost of particles on screen and I was barrel rolling at about 80 MPH while destroying my poor car.  

Another function that is normally only in the realm of PC gaming is the ability to move the position of the seat/cockpit camera while to most this is something they wont bother to play with it really is worth mapping the controls just to adjust this position to find that sweet position for your personal preference.

I played this on Both A set of Tritton Pro + 5.1 Headset and Home Cinema System consisting of: Yamaha AV Amp  Wharfedale Qube Satellite Speakers Sony centre and Sub and Sony Power amp.

Acoustically this game is rich and makes full use of 5.1, the surfaces all sound different, the gear box of the cars have that characteristic rally whine and you can even hear the sound of gravel hitting the under side of the body work.  

The sound has been so well done that in the event of you get a puncture you can tell by the noise which wheel it is without the co-driver needing to tell you.  

The co-driver depending on which car you drive sits either on your left or right and is constantly bombarding you with pace notes its nice that he only occupies the channel immediately next to you and if you drive in the cockpit as I do, acoustically its sounds like he is actually sitting right next to you but is speaking over an intercom, its difficult to explain but a very nice touch that became very evident when played on a 5.1 headset.

For all of these positives one thing sticks out and leaves me disappointed, this game is just so hard.  Its not hard in a good way it seems to be unfairly hard so much so that I tried continuously restarting an event to see if improving my times would mean I would climb the ranking and finish higher but as I got quicker so did the computer players.  I have been playing DiRT since back in Colin McRae days on Playstation and am Glad to see that Codemaster have moved away from the DiRT Showdown mess they brought out.  I understand that they are trying to make a true “rally” game but I feel that this is a little too “Niche” and will put people off what could be fundamentally a fantastic game.  Overall all I was left feeling like no matter how hard I tried the game was designed to show me how bad I really was.

We as gamers ultimately play games for fun and for a challenge not to be shown that we are in-fact not worthy of playing the game and in fact should return to our mundane lives or go play Mario Kart.  If the rewards were there or if the AI were a little more forgiving in the lower events I wouldn’t feel this way but unfortunately after giving it your all over 4 stages you end up with pretty much a 2 finger salute from the game.  The truly sad thing about this is it has all the ingredients to be an amazing game it looks fantastic, plays well, sounds amazing but even in the 1960’s Mini’s its like racing against the perfect driver every single race…… it gets tiresome.  Its such a shame at least 10 of my friends have been scared to buy this game (wanted to know what its like before they spent money on it)  and I so badly wanted to recommend it…….. and I wish I could, but I can’t.